How alcohol affects your body

PETA RASDIEN

September 02, 2015

Emergency medicine physician Daniel Fatovich sees people who have guzzled 20 or 30 drinks in a night and end up in hospital.

Alcohol intoxication can be the sole reason for their trip to the emergency department but more commonly they’ve binged on other substances as well or have suffered injury, self-harm or mental health issues.

“In the past 12 months or so we had a patient come in with a blood alcohol level of 0.6, they were fine and survived. And we regularly see people who have BAC of 0.3,” he said. People used to drinking a lot of alcohol have an increased tolerance.

“The vast majority of people, they just need to sleep it off and wait for the alcohol to get metabolised by the body, there is no way of speeding that up,” he said. “We never pump stomachs for alcohol, it would probably cause more harm than help.”

Professor Fatovich, head of the University of WA’s Centre for Clinical Research in Emergency Medicine, warned there were particular risks for young people who binge drink because it affected pathways in the brain that are still maturing.

“The brain doesn’t fully mature until 25 and serious concerns have been expressed about exposing the brain to alcohol before that age,” he said. “Certainly there are studies that have shown that having alcohol as a teenager affects school performance, their test results aren’t as good and they are more likely to get into social strife.”

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